Should you write first - optimize later?
-
We are redesigning the website for our blog and podcast for an upcoming press release. In rewriting to improve some of our blog posts, podcast descriptions, copywriting and overall presentation, would you recommend writing for the reader _first - _then optimizing through SEOMoz? Or should you write with SEO in mind first? I'm a rookie to SEO and would appreciate any recommendations or strategies you may have. Thank you!
-
Thank you for the reply, Dawn. I appreciate the feedback!
-
I'd definitely recommend writing for the humans with quality, focused content, but then optimizing the page so that it ticks the boxes from an SEO perspective. Nothing is worse than a page which is obviously written for SEO. Likewise, it's also no good if the page never gets seen as it doesn't rank.
A few tweaks here and there with written content to optimize subtly should do the trick.
-
Great analogy, Stephen - a perfect marriage of form and content. I really appreciate the feedback. Have a great night and an even better 2013!
-
I agree with Will. However, imagine that writing content is like building a really awesome skyscraper: you obviously are doing it for "the people" but you have to remember that the "building code inspector" (Google) will come along and make sure everything is in order.
Short story -- you should design for people and code for Google.
Just because the content is killer doesn't mean that it'll explode. However, if you write killer content that is coded for SEs and then distribute it to all your network, once everyone starts spreading it... Google will "endorse" it because they like the markup and you'll see great rankings as a result.
-
Really appreciate the feedback, Will. All the best and Happy New Year!
-
I am firmly in the write for humans camp, but I need to caveat that. You need to make sure that your re-design is optimized from a structural standpoint -- it sounds like you have done that, and you are just asking about whether you should write your content for humans or for algorithms. If that is the question, then I think you are much safer if you write for humans and make sure you create compelling, interesting, highly appealing content for your audience, and after that, you can do a keyword review. For almost any website, you are not going to succeed if you write boring content that hits your top keywords. But you will succeed if you write outstanding content that hits your keywords. Hope this is helpful.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Optimizing images and more for page speed
Hey everyone! I run a comparison/affiliate site for men's clothing. On the side of that, I have a Squarespace site for inspiration, articles and outfit pictures. I've tried to optimize site speed for the Squarespace site without much success. I've run all pictures trough JPEGmini to decrease file size but it doesn't seem to be enough. Below I attached the result I got when I run one of the pages trough Lighthouse and GTmetrix. Do you have recommendations of what I can do to improve the results? Is it a good idea to use next-gen formats for pictures as Google suggests as an example? Kind regards,
On-Page Optimization | | JonastriesSEO
Jonas XU131T0.png sPD3w13.png1 -
How to optimize Google Places listing?
I have a couple friends who need more traffic from their Google Places listing. They are in very niche businesses. One is a home remodeling contractor and one is a music teacher. Does anyone know some good services to help optimize their listings? I feel I've helped them out as much as I can by getting real reviews to their Google Places page. But I feel that someone who's had the experience in Google Places optimization can pick up on something I'm overlooking.
On-Page Optimization | | RicktheMarkt0 -
What does this mean on first step up setting up a campaign? "Having two "twin" domains that both resolve forces them to battle for SERP positions, making your SEO efforts less effective. We suggest redirecting one, then entering the other here."
I am BRAND new to this, and setting up my first campaign. I choose subdomain, and entered www.pdsaz.com. This is the message I receive: We have detected that the domain www.pdsaz.com and the domain pdsaz.com both respond to web requests and do not redirect. Having two "twin" domains that both resolve forces them to battle for SERP positions, making your SEO efforts less effective. We suggest redirecting one, then entering the other here.
On-Page Optimization | | cschwartzel0 -
This is a real dumb question about on page optimization
I've been reading the docs for using this site and am puzzled by the on page optimization reports, and the tactics for creating the reports. In no place can i find that you first must use the keywords you have identified to track in the campaign on pages on your web site. Am i missing something? From just reading how to do your campaign, it would appear that you never have to touch your pages with the keywords you want to track, all 500 of them for one page, if that's what you want to do. Not knowing how the application works, it is possible to imagine anything, including not needing to do the obvious steps of writing a well optimized page first. I want to presume that first you optimize your pages with the keywords you want to track, then go ahead and run your campaign. Although this is the obvious thing, I don't see that part of the seo puzzle being mentioned in any of the docs. Where do i hunt for that part of the equation?
On-Page Optimization | | highersourcesites0 -
Optimization of keywords in singular and plural
By Google Traductor: Hi, two questions:
On-Page Optimization | | romaro
1. What about the optimization of keywords in singular and plural?Do you recommend use landing pages in the plural and singularwords? as different results on Google searches in the plural andsingular.
2. Do you think that is a good strategy to generate a sitemap tosearch results pages based on searches by users of our site? Weplan to start generating a sitemap with a top 500 of the most popular searches and then scroll through to 1000, 2000, and more0 -
Re-optimizing onsite SEO, can it hurt?
We finished the re-design of our website a few months ago. We have hired a few freelance SEO guys that were horrible. We then decided to pull the SEO work in-house. I got nominated to do the SEO work. I started with what I thought was pretty good on-site SEO. At that time, with no experience, I was pretty proud of myself. I managed to get a bunch of our pages at top SERPs for long-tail keywords. Good enough for then. Now when I go look at the pages, I'm embarrassed to admit that it's my work. Please be kind. 🙂 Since then I have been trying to learn as much as possible about SEO. I'm certainly far ahead of where I was a few months ago. For the past few weeks I've been trying to focus my efforts on creating original keyword rich original content. Our competitors all have tried this, but their content is hardly readable by humans. Anyhow, we finished our fist article, it got indexed by G almost immediately and started to push our keyword SERPs up within just a few days. Now for my question. I have a much better understanding of on-page SEO and realize that I could make many improvements to ALL of our other pages. However, these pages are already doing fairly well with the SERPS and are moving up a few ranks a week. I'm very tempted to throw caution to the wind and completely redo all of our on-page SEO for our entire site. Is this a good strategy?
On-Page Optimization | | dmac
Should I expect our SERPs to drop a little, a lot, or not at all? I look forward to your response. DMac0 -
Google VS Yahoo VS Bing & Onpage Optimization in 2011
I was just wondering if someone could point out to me any known differences between these three search engines. I feel like i have been spending a lot of time optimizing for google, but don't have much of an idea of how to optimize for yahoo or bing. Do you have any up-to date article links or tips/advice?
On-Page Optimization | | adriandg0